It should be possible to get a temporary restraining order against the city in cases like this within days of the first contested case. It should be easy to demonstrate there is no imminent harm of telling the city, you have to stop doing this until we decide it's OK or not, and quite the opposite, cars are an essential and significant asset, and this policy placed a potentially massive burden on the citizens it effected.
In one of the examples, by the time the victim prevailed against the illegal seizure backed by zero evidence or investigation of any kind, they had already sold off his car, and offered nothing in return. A pretty large part of the population doesn't have a spare $2,000 in cash to get their own car back while the city makes them prove in front of a Kangaroo Court that they were driving their own family to the airport... Missing from the article -- is there any hope of any kind of restitution? Can the victims now pursue a civil case against the city?